Have you ever used a Mac? The hardware is not as amenable to tweaking, at least in the iMac — the Mac Pro is a tower, and the laptops are usually easier to tinker with than Windows laptops (MacBook Air excepted).
On the software side, you’ve bought into a lot of the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt arguments about how “closed” and “limited” Macs are. Mac OS is Unix. Not sorta kinda, but fully compliant, certified Unix. You want power and flexibility? Here’s a bash shell.
Windows is more popular, so there are more software titles. That’s pretty much the only advantage of Windows. On Mac, you’ll have a dozen word processing apps to choose from instead of a hundred — though on both platforms, the vast majority of users choose from two or three. PCs have more game titles, if that’s important to you.
Your train/car analogy vastly overstates the “limitations” of the Mac. Your PC “can go anywhere, and has no restrictions as to where I get my music, how I get it, what I visit”? Ditto my iMac. There are software titles I cannot run natively in Mac OS, but a minuscule number of files I cannot open and edit, servers I cannot connect to, and tasks I cannot perform.
In those rare cases, I can run Windows on the Mac at native speed. Programs like Parallels and Fusion are virtual machines, not emulators — they emulate the BIOS, not the hardware. I have Fusion, and can run multiple Windows versions, Ubunti and MacOS at the same time. The only time I use that is to test Web pages I’m building, to make sure they work with browsers (I’m looking at you, IE) that aren’t standards-compliant.
I know a lot of Windows support gurus. Unix admins and developers, techies of all stripes who choose Macs at home. They are certainly capable of building and endlessly tweaking systems, but choose not to. They have better things to do off the clock.
If you say so....
As for your “run anything” I hope you are seriously joking here.
Lets take my kids music. Burn a CD to our apple? Fuggedabout, especially our older CD’s. They have to be connected to the internet, to sync up with the apple store for licensing and all that jazz. Share music without usage rights? Fuggetaboudit.
Games? Guess what, I have kids. Kids love games. They can’t get those games on apple. On the apple, they can get games that other kids make fun of, not the games they want. Oh, eventually they can, after several years, their Warcraft game became available on the Mac, but... it ran like crap. They refused to play it on there, so they play it on their souped up, home made (by a 12 year old) smoke your socks off PC. Which was built for around 800 bucks, plus the monitor. That same system on an Apple? maybe 5 grand.
Now, as for me, I do city bids, they MUST be in excel format. I could run them from the apple, and convert them, and lose data and/or formatting each time I do that (which I have done), but I find that to suck. I don’t like things that suck.
My load calc programs are all PC based. I have yet to find one for the mac. I guess I could buy another Mac to take on the road to run the PC programs I need for my job, but why? Why pay 3x more for something that I don’t need? Our Think Pads work great.
Also, my diagnostic programs, you know... the ones you plug into large electrical equipment to diagnose it.... PC based. Now, I guess I could rework the 20 million dollar systems that are already in place, at my cost, maybe that would cost me a few million, and make my clients really really upset, especially when they need that equipment going YESTERDAY. I know, I’ll tell them...... umm, that Heidelburg afterburner runs on PC software, but I have it on good knowledge that apple stuff is much better, so I’m going to have to shut it all down, and scrap it and start over, because I have a shiny fancy apple....” I’d be booted out the door so fast, my neck would break.
Even smaller building environmental control programs are all PC based. I couldn’t effectively tap into an office building or campus and run the software I need to run, in a timely fashion.
So, bought into fear uncertainty and doubt? I think not. I think you’ve bought something, and are very protective about your buying decision. Like I said, if it works for you, great. For the rest of us, its a PC based world, unless your world is listening to music, and working with screen savers, and even then, most kids would rather have a PC where they can grab their music off of a torrent, instead of having to be shoved into the itunes store.
But, again, to each his own. I like apple, because it turns me a profit, and their stock has done well for us. I dislike apple, because PC works better for me and my kids. My wife likes apple, because they look nice, they are easy to use, and they are dummy proof (she’s no dummy, but she’s naive when it comes to computers), and she likes to get her music with 1 click, all safe, secure, tidy.
We had an old Mac we used as a word processor back up for years. We junked it. Wife now has an iMac on the kitchen counter. For her, she loves it, but it has trouble on our home network (win 7 based), but to be fair, our XP has trouble on that network as well. Also, she loves her iphone. She loves it to DEATH. I would be a fool to tell her that she should get something else. Why would I? She likes it. End of story. I have a cheap motorola phone, that has been dropped 2 stories and works great. I can push to talk my crew, and it is unbreakable. I don’t need music. I don’t need dancing bears. I don’t need ringtones. I need a solid, rubber encased phone, with good walky talky reception, that goes through walls, and works several basements below ground. Our needs are very different.
There is a reason Baskin Robins has 31 flavors... And I’m always amazed that some folks think everyone MUST love the Apple flavor. I like pralines and cream thank you, keep your Apple.
Now, all that being said, the article was about how Apples propriety control was its biggest asset. That is fundamentally wrong, and I still stay with it. This is what put Apple on the butchers block to begin with.
The reason so many large corporations use PC is that they are not committed to one company, and it is easy to upgrade, change things around. Few companies are going to buy hundreds or thousands of computers in one year, that will be reliant on a single vendor for both hardware and software. It wouldn’t make financial sense, and it would lead to being held hostage by your vendor. Instead, it is easy to buy PC’s, and if something needs upgrading, IT can go to newegg or whatever, buy a graphics card for 30 bucks, and stick it in.
Also, apples licensing and usage rights to their OS made it impractical for others use the the OS as the foundation for all sorts of things such as robotics, building controls, electrical controls, etc. PC could be used, in any language, early ones like FORTRAN 1 and 2 are still being used for this, and they work with PC, any PC. No one gets a cut of the licensing. Apple doesn’t control it, nor does Microsoft. Its just a PC platform.
For these reasons, Apple will never get big in the computer market. Big in terms of % of users. They may dominate the PDA market, and someday they may dominate the market of the casual user, but as long as they control their OS with an iron fist, and as long as their OS does not take well to add-ons from other vendors, they will never end up in the mainstream of engineering and controls.
Even when it comes to PDA’s, I keep hearing how already the DROID has capitalized on apples weakness of proprietary content, and many speculate that apple will be losing shares of the market at a very rapid pace (thus the deal with Verizon was done), in the next 2 years. Only time will tell. If apple loses its PDA share of the market, and they only have what? maybe 3% of the PC market, and already most analysts say their stock is a bubble (of which we personally own a good amount), the propriety attitude could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered a good thing. Well, not in my opinion, but then again, I’ve been wrong before, just ask my wife.
Good luck with your Apple FRiend, I hope it serves you well. I may someday be using Apples for our business, but not until the Apple OS becomes an industry standard for my line of work. My kids may move on to Apples when they get to college, but for now, they play games with their friends on PC. My wife has already been converted. So that’s where I stand on the issue, I had no intent on offending you, or any other apple user, and I’m not sure why so many apple users are offended that not everyone thinks Apple is the greatest thing in the world since sliced bread.
Sorry for the reply, was waiting for a phone call and just kept typing away :)